“The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency first claimed in 1996 that fine particles emitted from smokestacks and tailpipes — that is, soot — caused 15,000 Americans to die prematurely every year. Over the years, EPA escalated its body count to the point where first Obama EPA administrator Lisa Jackson testified to Congress in 2011 that fine particulate matter in the air (PM2.5) killed 570,000 Americans per year. That’s almost one-in-four annual deaths in the U.S. The United Nations adopted the EPA’s PM2.5 [i.e. fine particulates in the air] claims and extrapolated them into a global claim of 6.5 million deaths annually caused by soot.”

“The Obama administration used the EPA’s PM2.5 claim to destroy the U.S. coal industry with its various war-on-coal rules. Oddly enough, the Obama administration’s climate rules and “social cost of carbon” metric all depend on the notion that PM2.5 kills. The claimed effects of carbon dioxide pale in comparison.”

“So does PM2.5 actually kill that many people? Or really anyone at all? A new study just published in the journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology drives a stake through the heart of EPA’s claims.”

• No association of acute deaths with levels of PM2.5 or ozone is found.

• The data set and analysis code are made publicly available.

• With no association, causation is called into question for California.

Conclusion by the scientists, at this link: “The present paper adds to that literature by showing that, even by applying a variety of different statistical methods, we were unable to find any association between daily mortality and either PM 2.5 or ozone in what we believe to be the only public dataset based entirely on data since the 1997 revision of air pollution standards. Therefore, we conclude that the case for further revision of those standards is unproven at the present time.” https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1502/1502.03062.pdf